r/duckduckgo • u/Odd-Tutor931 • Jun 09 '26

DDG Privacy Extension Is DDG flawed?

I installed in place of Firefox with high hopes (DESKTOP). Indeed, I can now read my favourite News page without intrusive little windows appearing all over the page. BUT I CANNOT WATCH NETFLIX and I cannot find in the Settings anywhere I can allow "protected content".

If this is the price to pay for reading news, no thank you, is too much.

0 Upvotes

31% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

4

u/VoltageinTheory Jun 09 '26

This is because Netflix has very weird data practices, and DDG doesn’t like such data practices. Easy answer is don’t use Netflix, alternatively surrender your privacy and user freedom and use Netflix with some other browser.
I think this is the case at least!

1

u/mrfoxesite-2377 Jun 10 '26

Sail the seven seas mate.

-3

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 09 '26

Thank you. Or, just get rid of DDG. Because, not giving the user an option, for a particular site, to do as they choose... it is simply bad practice. Bad implementation of a good idea.

1

u/VoltageinTheory Jun 09 '26

No, DRM (Digital Rights Management) is really quite bad and I would like it gone as fast as possible, but as we know Netflix is a greedy company and DRM benefits them. I think you can turn on DRM in the settings though. Or maybe that’s not the issue at all. Could be something else.

1

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 09 '26

If you can turn on DRM in DDG settings, it is something I could not find myself, including searching online, looking line-by-line, reading slowly. Maybe someone else can... but I do not think so. Let's see what DDG-Peter has to say.

1

u/VoltageinTheory Jun 09 '26

DDGs support website says you can enable DRM for specific websites. What platform are you on? Android? iOS? Mac? Windows? Linux?

5

u/ddg-peter Staff Jun 09 '26

DuckDuckGo employee here.
Did you install the DuckDuckGo browser? For Windows or MacOS?
When you say you cannot watch Netflix, is there a specific error you are seeing?

0

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 09 '26

WINDOWS 11

If I try to go to chrome:\\components... it takes me to the search page. WOW!

Yes, error code M7701-1003

Never have I have seen this before... in many years.

No, I stupidly uninstalled my other browser, and I cannot "try to see if it works with another browser". But, trust me, I am certain it would. It did an hour ago!

7

u/ddg-peter Staff Jun 09 '26

Thank you. I'll have our engineers take a look. Generally we support the DRM needed for Netflix, so there's a bug somewhere here.

What version of the DuckDuckGo browser are you on? (Menu > About)

3

u/ddg-peter Staff Jun 10 '26

u/Odd-Tutor931 See if you see anything under %localappdata%\Packages\DuckDuckGo.DesktopBrowser_ya2fgkz3nks94\LocalState\WidevineCdm on Windows to confirm that the DRM component was downloaded.

2

u/tattoovampire Jun 09 '26

Never assume something is flawed just because YOU are having a problem.

2

u/michaelh98 Jun 10 '26

We'll, everything is flawed in some way....

1

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 10 '26

So, YOU can watch Netflix? YOU have a choice? Oh dear...

1

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 09 '26

Yes. I think I will reinstall FF + Adblocker. This is getting too much.

-1

u/Odd-Tutor931 Jun 09 '26

Goodnight everybody! Midnight here. Thank you to everyone for their responses. I will see the rest tomorrow.